Starburst

4

Message received from Sheffield Jackman, Starship Constitution, y 95.

ACCORDING TO LETSKI WE ARE NOW TRAVELING AT JUST ABOUT 15 percent of the speed of light, almost 30,000 miles per second. Of course, we don't feel that, and there aren't any telephone poles going by outside the window; as far as we can tell, we're pretty much standing still. The fusion thrust is operating smoothly d well. We've got ourselves a new operating engineer, because Becklund has taken quite an interest in plasma physics and to Letski to teach him the drill. So the two of them spend a lot of time back at the shield. Fuel, power, and life-support indices are right on the curve. There's no sweat of any kind with the ship, or, really, with anything else. Dot Letski calculated the other day that we've accumulated more an 35,000 mph in delta-Vs now (of course, it doesn't all show up relative speed), so that we've passed escape velocity from then.

Up until then if we'd just cut the motors we'd have fallen back—sooner or later. Now we'd just go on forever. Interesting ought. What we do see out the ports is interesting, too. Relativistic effects have begun to show up as predicted. Jim Barstow's spectral studies show the stars in front of us are showing shift to the blue end, and the Sun and the other stars behind us are shifting to the red. Without the spectroscope you can't see much, though. Beta Centauri looks a little funny, maybe. As for the Sun, it's still very bright—Jim logged it as minus-six magnitude the other y—and as I've never seen it quite that way before, I can't tell ether the color looks right or not. It certainly isn't the golden flow I associate with type GO, but neither is Alpha Centauri ahead of us, and I don't really see a difference between them. I think the reason is simply that they are so bright that the color impressions are secondary to the brightness impressions, although the spectroscope, as I say, does show the differences. It doesn't look a whole lot like the "starbow" Dr. Knefhausen promised us, but maybe it's early yet. We've all taken turns at looking back. Naturally enough, I guess. We can still make out the Earth and even the Moon in the telescope, but it's chancy. Ski almost got an eyeful of the Sun at full light-gathering aperture yesterday because the visual separation is only about twelve seconds of arc now. In a few more days they'll be too close to separate.

Let's see, what else?

We've been having a fine time with the recreational math program. Ann has taken to binary arithmetic like a duck to water. She's been involved in what I take to be some sort of statistical experimentation (we don't pry too much into what the others are doing until they're ready to talk about it—since we don't really have privacy, we have to make some), and, of all things, she demanded that we produce coins for her to flip. Well, naturally none of us had taken any money with us! Except that it turns out two of us did. Ski had a Russian silver ruble that his mother's uncle had given him for luck, and I found an old Philadelphia transit token in my pocket. Ann rejected my token as too light to be reliable, but she now spends happy hours flipping the ruble, heads or tails, and writing down the results as a series of six-place binary numbers, heads for 1 and tails for 0. After about a week my curiosity got too much for me so I began hinting to find out what she was doing. When I ask she says things like, "By means of the easy and the simple we grasp the laws of the whole world." When I say that's nice but what laws does she hope to grasp by flipping the coin? she says, "When the laws of the whole world are grasped, therein lies perfection." So, as I say, we don't press each other, and anyway it keeps her off the streets. I leave it there. It probably has something to do with her books. We all brought some, of course, in our personal allowances, and mostly we made them common property right away, but Ann kept a couple out. That's all right, though. The common ones have got pretty familiar to all of us already. When she's ready to share the others they'll be like Christmas presents, and we can all use a little surprise now and then.

Kneffie would be proud of himself if he could see how our recreation keeps us busy. None of us has managed to prove Fermat's Last Theorem yet or anything like that. But of course that's the whole point. If we could solve the problems, we'd have used them up. And then what would we do for recreation? The stuff does exactly what it was intended to. It keeps us mentally alert on this long and intrinsically rather dull boat ride.

Now we come to the parts that never get dull! I refer, of course, to what you call "personal relationships." They are really jes' fine, fellows, jes' fine. A lot better than any of us actually hoped, back there at the personal-hygiene briefings at the Houston Space Center. We follow the book. The girls take the stripy pills every day until just before their periods, then they take the green pills for four days, then they lay off pills for four days (what we call the "Weekend in Vegas"). Then back to the stripes. There was a little embarrassed joking about it at first, but we got over that. Now it's strictly routine, like brushing the teeth. We men take our red pills every day (Ski calls them "stoplights") until our wives tell us they're about to lay off. Then we take the Blue Devil (that's what we call the antidote) and have a hell of a time until the girls are on the stripes again. None of us thought any of this would work, you know. But it works fine. I don't even think sex until Flo kisses my ear and tells me she's ready to, excuse the expression, come in heat. And then like wow! Same with everybody. The aft chamber with the nice wide bunks we call "Honeymoon Hotel." It belongs to whoever needs it, and never once have both bunks been used. The rest of the time we just sleep wherever is convenient, and nobody gets uptight about it.

Excuse my getting personal, but you told me you wanted to know everything, and there's not much else to tell. We eat and sleep and look out the ports and the plasma jet thrums right along at our point-seven-five Gee, and nothing has given any trouble, or even looked as though it might be thinking about giving trouble later on. So we get quite into personal things.

But they're all right, really. We've even got used to the recycling system. None of us thought we'd get with the suction toilet, not to mention what happens to the contents, but we did. It was a little, well, annoying, at first—no, "annoying" isn't the word. Say "sordid." But now it's fine. The treated product goes into the sludge tanks, feces and urine together. The sludge from the algae goes into the hydroponic tanks, but of course by that time it's nothing but greeny-brown sort of decaying-looking vegetable matter. My father used to get worse than that out of his mulch beds every fall. That's all handled pretty much automatically anyway, so our first real physical contact with the system comes in the kitchen. By that time it's all cosmetically clean. The food we eat comes in the form of nice red tomatoes and crispy little carrots and stuff like that. (We do miss animal protein a little. The frozen stores have to last a long time, so each hamburger is a ceremonial feast. We only have them once a week or so.) The water we drink comes actually out of the air, condensed by the dehumidifiers into the reserve tanks, where we pipe it out to drink. It's all chilled and aerated, and it tastes fine. Of course, the way it gets into the air in the first place is by being sweated out of our pores or transpired from the plants (which are irrigated direct from the treated product of the reclamation tanks after the solids have settled out). We all know perfectly well, when we stop to think of it, that every drop we drink has passed through all our kidneys, and will go on doing so for ten years. But not without stops along the way. That's the point. What we drink is clear, sweet dew. And if it was once something else, well, can't you say the same of Lake Erie?

There's probably a million other things I ought to tell you about, but—

Shef Jackman clicked off the dictating switch and looked around at Ann Becklund, grinning. "But you'd bust his chops," she said dreamily, without looking up from her ruble. She was spinning it on her library shelf, and when it slowed and toppled its ringing was softer and mellower than on Earth.

Jackman shrugged, meaning that he took her point, and agreed with it, but nevertheless wanted to think it out for himself; they had all come to know each other well enough to dispense with a lot of talking. Jackman leaned back, taking his time to think the matter through. The privilege of doing that, of being able at any time to do that, was something new to him. Since the only thing they really had to do for the next several years was to stay alive there was no fidgety timetabling, no deadlines, no pressures; long elliptical thoughts could round themselves out at their own pace.

"Could tell old Dieter about everybody getting bombed," he offered slyly. For answer to that Ann needed no words at all, only a glance out of the corner of her eye. She closed her eyes for a moment, bored with her ruble, and Jackman allowed himself to close his. It was very peaceful where they were, in the communications corner of the plotting/control/instrument room. Although Constitution was smaller than a two-bedroom bungalow, it had crannies where eight people could almost lose themselves. Letski and Ann's husband, Will Becklund, were back as close to the plasma chamber as the shielding would let them get. The Barstows were off to Vegas, the others who knew where; Jackman and Ann Becklund were alone.

When Jackman opened his eyes he reflected that it was not entirely true, what he had told Dieter von Knefhausen about not thinking of sex at all when you were taking your pills. Ann had roused and uncurled herself and she was doing some sort of languid, slow-motion stretching exercises. They had all got quite informal about what they wore. Even Shef had come down to a pair of sun tan uniform shorts and, sometimes, socks. So had all four of the women. All four of them had been foxy to begin with and bustwise, Shef decided appreciatively, the three-quarters gravity had made them even foxier. The only thing the pills did was that although you didn't stop thinking about making love, you didn't have the need to do anything about it.

Or had not so far, at least.

Ann lurched, and scowled at Jackman. Jackman had felt the same hiccough in the acceleration that held them down; he scowled back in agreement and reached for the intercom. "Will, Ski," he called, "what the hell?"

There was a sort of giggle from the other end, and a brief whispering. Then Will's voice said, "Maintenance check." He was giggling again when he switched off.

"Don't blow the old Kraut's mind," said Ann softly, and Jackman nodded agreement. He picked up the dictation microphone again and finished his transmission:

"—but you've probably got the idea by now. We're happy in the service, and we all thank you for this pleasure cruise, every one!"